Tag: Dakota Blue Richards

As mentioned in my review of Stardust, The Lord of the Rings created a very top-heavy media environment based on adaptations and remakes of recognizable properties– an environment that is today showing its cracks as Hollywood struggles to find more such properties, and equally struggles to balance the needs of the adaptation process with the expectations of an increasingly demanding fan base. I also mentioned that The Lord of the Rings briefly gave the impression that fantasy as a genre was suddenly profitable in Hollywood, which it wasn’t.

The Golden Compass is emblematic of both of those issues, having been greenlit all the way back in February 2002, just two months after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, by the same studio that had made that film, New Line Cinema. It then went through a long, troubled development, with writer/director Chris Weitz repeatedly being sent to the drawing board over concerns that his adapted screenplay wasn’t marketable in the United States.

The reason for that is probably the best-known thing about this movie. The Golden Compass was adapted from part of a book series called His Dark Materials, written in the 1990s by British author Philip Pullman, whose main villain, the Magisterium, is allegedly a stand-in for religion in general. For this reason, Weitz was ordered to tone down the atheistic message for fear of generating controversy. Of course, that happened anyway: almost every Christian group in America, Protestant or Catholic, spoke out against the film, and the country being significantly more religious in 2007 than today, this bad buzz supposedly turned The Golden Compass into a failure.

I seriously doubt this theory, as not only was His Dark Materials pretty obscure in the US to begin with; the film just plainly sucks. Watching it, I immediately understood what was wrong, and it just kept going.

The Golden Compass is set in a parallel world to our own, roughly analogous to a futurized version of the 1930s, in which a mysterious cosmic element known only as “dust” causes human souls to manifest in the form of intelligent spirit animals known as daemons. Because the dust has yet to settle on children, their daemons have the power to change form before deciding on a final adult incarnation, but there are machinations afoot to prevent the dust from taking hold altogether.

I will try to explain this inasmuch as the film explains anything at all: the Magisterium, our stand-in for the Catholic Church, wants to suppress the study or application of dust by restricting scientific research and using technology to sever the psychic link between children and their daemons. In service of this, children all over the world are being abducted by bandits known as Gobblers and sent to a research facility/prison in the Arctic.

The leading researcher into dust is Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), who is sent away from Jordan College due to his views and vows to study dust on his own, possibly uncovering the secret of parallel worlds. Soon after, Asriel’s orphan niece Lyra Belaqua (Dakota Blue Richards) and her daemon Pantalaimon (Freddie Highmore) are sent into the care of the mysterious and glamorous Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman). Before leaving the college, however, one of Asriel’s sympathetic compatriots gives Lyra the last surviving Golden Compass, a cosmic Magic 8-Ball powered by the dust; though the knowledge required to use it is long lost, Lyra takes to it immediately, the film implying that she is the subject of a “witches’ prophecy.” Yep, another YA chosen-one.

After being paraded around what appears to be this world’s version of London, Lyra escapes from Coulter, who is leading the Gobblers, and is rescued by a band of Gyptians (think Gypsies crossed with Vikings) who themselves have lost a child and are on a mission to the Arctic to find him. On the way, Lyra meets pilot Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), whose services are needed to reach their destination, as well as Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), the exiled former king of a race of talking warrior polar bears who seeks to recapture his throne from Ragnar Sturlusson (Ian McShane), who is himself seeking a human-style daemon. She also runs in with Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green), one of a race of witches who briefly implies she is Lyra’s mother, but this is confusing in itself for reasons I won’t spoil.

If you’re noticing a lot of high-profile actors in here, it’s not for nothing. Jim Carter, Kathy Bates, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Lee, and Derek Jacobi additionally show up in minor-to-medium roles, and this gets at the first problem with the film: everything is super-rushed. I didn’t read the first book, but I’m guessing it was way longer; every new character is introduced suddenly, yet with a sense of majesty and revelation suggesting a lot of buildup that never happened. Weitz allegedly did as much as he could to stay loyal to the book, but that’s more of a liability than an asset with a runtime under two hours.

The second problem is that I’m fairly certain the book is a lot darker and more violent than would strictly be allowed for a movie aimed at kids– i.e. it has blood. The film by contrast is an achievement in bloodless carnage, straining credibility by omitting any sign of the precious red fluid even in scenes that demand it, such as when one character’s jaw is torn off.

The third and perhaps largest problem is that it’s incomplete, with a ton of characters and plot threads being introduced without even the hint of resolution. After doing some research, I discovered that not only is The Golden Compass the first of a series, it omits the somewhat fatalistic final three chapters of the book it’s based on (Northern Lights) in the hope of giving audiences a happier ending, and presumably leaving the rest for sequels that would never come. The resulting product gives the impression that New Line was totally confident that the film would do well enough launch a franchise, yet also terrified that the book’s atheistic themes would kill its success. Ultimately, both expectations proved wrong.

Sign This Was Made in 2007Meta Edition! Catholic and Protestant groups were united in opposition to this film. Today, anti-Catholic sentiment is making a fashionable comeback in America, and the former Moral Majority would probably delight in the movie’s anti-clericalism.

How Did It Do?At $372.2 million worldwide, The Golden Compass was the thirteenth highest-grossing picture of 2007. That should not be considered a failure, and yet it is. First, it had a mindblowing $180 million budget, equivalent to those of the first two Lord of the Rings movies combined, and thus barely broke even. Second, it made a pitiful $70 million the United States– virtually the only country where it wasn’t a hit, but also the home country of New Line, severely undermining the business world’s already-waning confidence in the company.

Nevertheless, taking the business receipts at face value would suggest that the only problem was that American audiences were presumably too dumb and puritanical to appreciate the movie. Unfortunately, critics tell a different story: The Golden Compass currently holds an anemic 43% rating on RottenTomatoes, with the words “rushed,” “underdeveloped,” and “convoluted” being thrown around a lot. This time, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone got the last laugh, declaring that it merely sucked irrespective of any theological controversy around it, that Nicole Kidman was a better villain in Margot at the Wedding, and that she and Daniel Craig were just as “good” here as in The Invasion. Bless you, Travers.

Shortly after The Golden Compass’ release, Lord of the Rings’ director Peter Jackson, producer Saul Zaentz, and fifteen cast members all filed suit against New Line for accounting practices intended to conceal profits and thus avoid paying them residuals. You read that correctly: New Line was alleging that The Lord of the Rings had never made money, nor had any of its major franchises. This is not unheard of in Hollywood; New Line’s parent company Warner Brothers still maintains that Goodfellas has never turned a profit, and the guys behind This Is Spinal Tap are suing StudioCanal for the same (if they win, it would likely end the practice, which is still somehow legal).

The embarrassment over this movie was the last straw: New Line’s founders resigned and the studio was shut down, henceforth existing only as an alternative marketing label for Warner Bros. To recap: The Golden Compass brought down the studio that created it and its entire genre. If that isn’t a failure, I don’t know what is.